Terry Pratchett

“It is said that the Devil has all the best tunes. This is broadly true. But Heaven has the best choreographers”

“People couldn't become truly holy, he said, unless they also had the opportunity to be definitively wicked.”

“I'm not the world's greatest expert, but I would have thought that the wizards, witches, trolls, unicorns, ... broomsticks and spells would have given her a clue?' - when J.K. Rowling insisted she wasn't writing fantasy.”

“Anyway, if you stop tellin' people it's all sorted out afer they're dead, they might try sorting it all out while they're alive. ”

“The dark moppets of dread played their paranoid hopscotch across Moist's inner eyeballs. ”

“Go anywhere you wish, talk to everyone. Ask any questions; you will be given answers. When you want to learn, you will be taught. Use the library. Open any book.”

“There was no himself in himself.”

“A weapon you held and didn't know how to use belonged to your enemy.”

“No one is actually dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away...”

“Death rode out, but found himself guiding the white horse down the track to the orchard. He stopped in front of one particular tree, and stared at it for some time. Eventually he said: LOOKS PERFECTLY LOGICAL TO ME.”

“In theory it was, around now, Literature. Susan hated Literature. She'd much prefer to read a good book.”

“Les choses ne nous arrivent pas, c'est nous qui arrivons aux choses”

“Death strode away, stopped, and came back. He pointed a skeletal finger at The Duck Man.WHY, he said, ARE YOU WALKING AROUND WITH THAT DUCK?"What duck?"AH. SORRY.”

“People don't like change. But make the change fast enough and you go from one type of normal to another.”

“Tell someone you are going to rob them and all that will happen is that you'll get a reputation as a truthful man.”

“The wages of sin is death but so is the salary of virtue, and at least the evil get to go home early on Fridays.”

“It is often said that before you die your life passes before your eyes. It is in fact true. It's called living.”

“At such times the universe gets a little closer to us. They are strange times, times of beginnings and endings. Dangerous and powerful. And we feel it even if we don't know what it is. These times are not necessarily good, and not necessarily bad. In fact, what they are depends on what *we* are.”

“I should have learned this, she thought. I wanted to learn fire, and pain, but I should have learned people.”

“Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.”

“The trouble was that he was talking in philosophy but they were listening in gibberish.”

“There is always a choice." "You mean I could choose certain death?" "A choice nevertheless, or perhaps an alternative. You see I believe in freedom. Not many people do, although they will of course protest otherwise. And no practical definition of freedom would be complete without the freedom to take the consequences. Indeed, it is the freedom upon which all the others are based.”

“Dedication: My thanks to the people who showed me that opera was stranger than I could imagine. I can best repay their kindness by not mentioning their names here.”

“Letitia! What a name. Halfway between a salad and a sneeze.”

“We are here and it is now. The way I see it is, after that, everything tends towards guesswork.”

“Someone has to do it. It's all very well calling for eye of newt, but do you mean Common, Spotted or Great Crested? Which eye, anyway? Will tapioca do just as well? If we substitute egg white will the spell a) work b) fail or c) melt the bottom out of the cauldron? Goodie Whemper's curiosity about such things was huge and insatiable*. * Nearly insatiable. It was probably satiated in her last flight to test whether a broomstick could survive having its bristles pulled out one by one in mid-air. According to the small black raven she had trained as a flight recorder, the answer was almost certainly no.”

“You know how to pray, don’t you? Just put your hands together and hope.”

“Waily-Waily!”

“Many bad things were done under the Evil Empire" she said. "The best we can do now is undo them. Will you assist in this endeavor?" "In every way that I can" said Nutt."I would like you to teach them civilized behavior," said Ladyship coldly.He appeared to consider this. "Yes, of course, I think, that would be quite possible," he said. "And who would you send to teach the humans?"There was a brief outburst of laughter from Vetinari, who immediately cupped his hand over his mouth. "Oh I do beg your pardon," he said.”

“The female mind is certainly a devious one, my lord." Vetinari looked at his secretary in surprise. "Well, of course it is. It has to deal with the male one.”

“Mister Teatime had a truly brilliant mind, but it was brilliant like a fractured mirror, all marvellous facets and rainbows but, ultimately, also something that was broken.”

“Vimes struggled to his feet, shook his head and set off after it. No thought was involved. It is the ancient instinct of terriers and policemen to chase anything that runs away.”

“Anyway, Angua seemed to have taken this case personally. She always had a soft spot for the underdog.So did Vimes. You had to. Not because they were pure or noble, because they weren't. You had to be on the side of underdogs because they weren't overdogs.”

“All tapes left in a car for more than about a fortnight metamorphose into Best of Queen albums.”

“Once you gave a thing a name, you gave it life.”

“When in doubt, choose to live.”

“It looked like the sort of book described in library catalogues as 'slightly foxed', although it would be more honest to admit that it looked as though it had been badgered, wolved and possibly beared as well.”

“This is Morbidia," said Vlad. "Although she's been calling herself Tracy lately, to be cool.”

“...for the first time Rincewind saw the troll.It wasn’t half so bad as he had imagined.Umm, said his imagination after a while.It wasn’t that the troll was horrifying. Instead of the rotting, betentacled monstrosity he had been expecting Rincewind found himself looking at a rather squat but not particularly ugly old man who would quite easily have passed for normal on any city street, always provided that other people on the street were used to seeing old men who were apparently composed of water and very little else. It was as if the ocean had decided to create life without going through all that tedious business of evolution, and had simply formed a part of itself into a biped and sent it walking squishily up the beach.(…) How does he hold himself together, his mind screamed at him. Why doesn’t he spill?”

“Only Ron's dog was watching William. He considered that it had, for a dog, a very offensive and knowing look.A couple of months ago someaone had tried to hand William the old story about there being a dog in the city that could talk. (...) The dog in front of William didn't look as if it could talk, but it DID look as if it would swear.”

“Ah," said Mr Pin. "Right. I remember. You are concerned citizens." He knew about concerned citizens. Wherever they were, they all spoke the same private language, where 'traditional values' meant 'hang someone'.”

“Insofar as he'd formed any opinion of her, it was that she suffered from misplaced gentility and the mistaken belief that etiquette meant good breeding. She mistook mannerisms for manners.”

“Walter Plinge said: "You know she asked me a very silly question Mrs Ogg! It was a silly question any fool knows the answer!""Oh, yes," said Nanny. "About houses on fire, I expect...""Yes! What would I take out of our house if it was on fire!""I expect you were a good boy and said you'd take your mum," said Nanny."No! My mum would take herself!""What would you take out then, Walter?" Nanny said."The fire!”

“All the higher life forms scythed away, just like that. [ . . . ] Nothing but dust and fundamentalists.”

“Nor had he, as far as he knew, ever believed in anything. It had been embarrassing, because he quite wanted to believe in something, since he recognized that belief was the lifebelt that got most people through the choppy waters of Life. He'd have liked to believe in a supreme God, although he'd have preferred a half-hour's chat with Him before committing himself, to clear up one or two points. He'd sat in all sorts of churches, waiting for that single flash of blue light, and it hadn't come. And then he'd tried to become an official Atheist and hadn't got the rock-hard, self-satisfied strength of belief even for that. And every single political party had seemed to him equally dishonest. And he'd give up on ecology...Then he'd tried believe in the Universe, which seemed sound enough until he'd innocently started reading books with words like Chaos and Time and Quantum in the titles. He'd found that even the people whose job of work was, so to speak, the Universe, didn't really believe in it and were actually quite proud of not knowing what or even if it could theoretically exist.”

“He'd always known that the world was an interesting place, and his imagination had peopled it with pirates and bandits and spies and astronauts and similar. But he'd also had a nagging suspicion that, when you seriously got right down to it, they were all just things in books and didn't properly exist anymore.”

“They didn't have to be funny — they were father jokes.”

“But you ain't part of it, are you?" said Granny conversationally. "You try, but you always find yourself watchin' yourself watchin' people, eh? Never quite believin' anything? Thinkin' the wrong thoughts?”

“Nanny's philosophy of life was to do what seemed like a good idea at the time, and do it as hard as possible. It had never let her down.”

“Any sensible ruler would have killed off Leonard, and Lord Vetinari was extremely sensible and often wondered why he had not done so. He'd decided that it was because, imprisoned in the priceless, inquiring amber of Leonard's massive mind, underneath that bright investigative genius was a kind of willful innocence that might in lesser men be called stupidity. It was the seat and soul of that force which, down the millennia, had caused mankind to stick its fingers in the electric light socket of the Universe and play with the switch to see what happened - and then be very surprised when it did.”